Michael Arrington Interview: SOTB 2009
Richard Jalichandra, CEO of Technorati speaks with Michael Arrington, major domo of TechCrunch for the 2009 Technorati state of the Blogosphere report.
Richard Jalichandra: Tell me a little bit about why you started blogging.
Michael Arrington: The first time I ever read a blog or any concept of a blog was scripting Dave Winer's site probably like 2000, 2001. I just somehow started seeing links to it and I said "Wow this is... this is really cool, this is like a person - it's fact but it's all opinion" - you know what I mean. I get so much more of an idea of what's important and what isn't.
And so I didn't really know anything about a blog was or anything about it or who Dave Winer was, but I realized that he was an expert and that it was really interesting to me to get some news that way about what was important, rather than like CNET.
So what I did is went to Scripting News probably once a day or two or three times a week, I think I started getting emails pretty early on just to know what's important, what's going on.
I was doing other stuff, I was at a tech company, but just to know what was going on for conversation purposes, I found that was better than anything out there - CNET or anything.
I was sort of aware of blogs from that point on. I dabbled in blogging, and I realized I liked it.
Some people like blogging, some people don't, some people because it's their pastime or hobby and they just find that if they want to unwind or spend some time, and it happens that they want to write something about it: I'm one of those people.
In 2005 I was at point where my career was stalled. I had sold a company and was spending the money, living on a beach. It was actually a really good life but I was running out of money and I got a call from a former business partner, my friend Keith Teare and Keith had a start-up called RealNames in the '90s - it was a client of mine when I was a lawyer.
So Keith says, "Hey I want to start-up a start-up with you," and I realized I was pretty much out of the loop, the Internet for me was new - I had a blog, email and that was it. So I started doing fairly disciplined research on these start-ups and realized two things quickly: one is that flickr, del.icio.us and others were being covered by blogs and news sites, but there was no single site that was sort of "the place to go" to get news on start-ups.
And I thought, "Why am I not posting this on the web for other people to see? If I post this on the web, the CEO of Technorati is going to read this and the next time I run into him at a cocktail party it might be a conversation starter." So for networking purposes, it seemed like a really good idea.
RJ: So at that point were you already thinking that might be a business opportunity or was it just a networking opportunity...
MA: No, no, no - at that point I thought, why don't I post my research to the web? So my first month, I think every post was titled, "Profile - Technorati," and I think Bloglines and Technorati were my very first posts on June 11th of 05. I think Technorati just re-launched.
It was very formatted - it was very semantic, too structured, but very quickly I started getting followers and links coming in - occasional comments and that's great feedback: it's what feeds the blogger, and "Like wow, people are reading this," and so it just started growing.
Meanwhile, Keith wanted me to move up to Silicon Valley from LA, so I moved up here and got a house to form the business side of it — we were starting at GO — and TechCrunch just keep growing and growing.
People started hanging out at my house and I started having parties for 20 people, and then pretty soon there were 100 people and then 600 people. We had parties all the time and events and and talked about what TechCrunch is. And about 6 months in late '05 that John... from Federated Media...
RJ: John Battelle
MA : John Battelle said hey you know I'm starting out this ad network for blogs and I...
RJ : At that point did you have ads on your site?
MA: Nothing at all, not even Google ads. I reached out to him and said that I really, really want to be part of this and he looked at it and he's like we'll let you in and that was when we first started getting revenue.
RJ: "We'll let you in..."
MA: No no, it was definitely that. We were really really small...
So, we applied and then soon we started getting revenue and I started hiring writers and that was it, we worked from there...
RJ: So the business — the decision when you thought it was a business — was actually a fairly quick realization.
MA: Yes, it was. It took six, seven months but I realized I can at least make some revenue from this.
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